Web3 Leader Spotlight: Pratham Prasoon
In honor of this significant milestone, this week, we had the privilege of speaking with Pratham Prasoon, a distinguished Developer Relations Engineer at Eclipse Labs. Join us as we delve into the insights of this industry luminary, shedding light on the remarkable developments at Eclipse Labs, becoming a blockchain developer and the world of Solana.
What factors influenced Eclipse's decision to utilize the Solana Virtual Machine as a solution for tackling scalability and performance issues within the Ethereum ecosystem?
Simply put, SVM is a powerhouse.
- Performance : The SVM has incredible transaction throughput and low latency. Also, being highly parallelized enables parallel processing of smart contracts, which maximizes efficiency on the hardware it is being run on. There are also upgrades being bought by firedancer’s client that will further improve performance and stability.
- Developer experience : SVM also has great developer tooling with support for Rust, C, Solidity with Solang, and also Neon EVM. Not to mention several SDKs from Metaplex and thirdweb, which make development on the SVM a great experience.
- Fee Markets : Another advantage of SVM is its localized fee markets. It allows for transaction pricing based on localized network conditions, which leads to more resource-efficient allocation and makes the network less prone to spam attacks.
Security is a paramount concern in the blockchain space. How does Eclipse ensure the security and trustworthiness of its Layer 2 infrastructure?
We will have audits from some of the best security firms for standard safety and liveness properties. We’re also building out industry-standard tech with the likes of fault proofs, forced inclusion, etc.
What advice would you offer to aspiring blockchain developers who are just starting their journey and are interested in building on Eclipse or other blockchain platforms?
There are so many ways to become a blockchain developer, and knowing how to choose the right path depends on your interests. For example, you could work on core protocol development, security, or building forward-facing dApps. Knowing which part of blockchains you're interested in comes from exploration, so spend a few months figuring out what you like. Use online resources like courses, ChatGPT, Google, etc., in your journey. Open source the code you write on GitHub, share your work on X (Twitter) and connect with other folks in the community.
In my case, I started my blockchain journey in 2021 and became very interested in the performance and UX benefits that Solana brought after trying multiple other chains. This encouraged me to dive deeper into understanding L2, sharding, zero knowledge, consensus mechanisms, Sybil resistance, and blockchain infrastructure in general. I happened to learn about modular blockchains after being selected for Celestia’s modular fellows cohort last year, which eventually led me to work for Eclipse.
Looking ahead, what are your thoughts on the future of Layer 2 solutions in the blockchain industry and Eclipse's role within this evolving landscape?
This is an ever-growing and incredibly competitive space, and I expect it to become even more competitive. However, I’m fully confident that Eclipse is best positioned to thrive in this market. Eclipse's mainnet offers an exceptional developer experience thanks to the remarkable performance of the SVM combined with the liquidity of Ethereum.
Eclipse will enable innovative use cases like DePIN for the Ethereum community, and I couldn’t be more excited.
Our CEO, Neel Somani, wrote an insightful blog post about a brief history of Eclipse. I recommend checking it out if you want to learn more about Eclipse’s history. I also expect to see more innovation in zero-knowledge technology in the next few years, along with Data Availability Sampling(DAS) and EIP-4844(Proto-Danksharding), making Layer 2 chains even cheaper and more efficient.
